BRAIN- a total understanding of the brain would eradicate the idea of individual responsibility entirely.

Our understanding of the brain is still extremely limited. In one cubic millimetre of brain tissue there are a hundred million synaptic connections between neurons. Current imaging methods rely on blood-flow signals that cover tens of cubic millimetres of brain tissue. 7 The upshot, as Eagleman vividly puts it, is that ‘modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing’. 8 Though it may never be attained, a total understanding of the brain would eradicate the idea of individual responsibility entirely. But we do not have to wait for advances in science to understand that if someone behaves differently from us in a given situation, it is because they are different from us. We may lack the technology to identify the relevant way in which their neurocircuitry differs from our own, but the evidence of the difference lies in the behaviour. If we had exactly the same brain state and encountered the same situation then, all else being equal, we would behave in exactly the same way. This principle holds whether we are using it to explain the exceptional intellectual gifts of Einstein (which, incidentally, led him to reject the myth of responsibility) or the extraordinary moral failings of HTLR